iNode: Nota Bene

I set up a new Unix box the other day – Tomato OS on a Linksys WRT54G. I was surprised to see that the time was set before 1970! But Unix time starts in 1 Jan 1970, doesn't it?

# date
Wed Dec 31 16:08:50 PST 1969

Mmm … it took a moment or two to sink in (actually, the evidence is that it took 31 seconds …)

# TZ=UTC date
Thu Jan  1 00:09:21 UTC 1970

Yep, Unix time starts on 1 Jan 1970 all right … in the UTC timezone. This machine had defaulted to PST, which is 8 hours west of the prime meridian …

Time Lords may relax; heavy transuranic elements will not be required.

I've had OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54Gs for a year or so now, but although it works fine as an AP, I've not had much luck with WDS (Wireless Distribution System).

People have been recommending the Tomato firmware as an alternative for a while now, so I decided to give it a go. Mmm, a problem …

root@gl:~# mtd -r write WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin linux
Bad trx header
This is not the correct file format; refusing to flash.
Please specify the correct file or use -f to force.
Image check failed.

Unfortunately, the Tomato firmware is distributed as ‘.bin' files, not ’.trx', and according to comments on the x-wrt website (http://forum.x-wrt.org/index.php?topic=429.0;wap2) the OpenWRT flash updater mtd no longer supports these for installation, so you can't get there from here …

The FreeWRT mailing list (http://osdir.com/ml/embedded.freewrt.general/2007−01/msg00007.html) claims that their mtd binary can be used for the install, so I tried that …

root@gl:~# ./mtd-static -r write WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin linux
Unlocking linux ...
Writing from WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin to linux ...  [w]

Rebooting ...

Unfortunately, the machine ended up bricked. Actually, both a WRT54GL and a WRT54Gv2 were bricked by this. Luckily, it was only a bad boot loader, and the dd-wrt wiki has a great page for diagnosis and recovery actions – http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Recover_from_a_Bad_Flash

So in the end, I just used the firmware's default TFTP-on-boot facility to put the Tomato OS onto the devices, which worked just fine. And without getting involved in huge configuration, WDS is now operating between the ISP-connected unit, and the one with all the wired devices connected; and they both work as Access Points too.

The ESO - European Southern Observatory have been closely watching 28 stars at the centre of our galaxy for the last 16 years, and now they have released some stunning animation showing how these stars are orbiting an unseen object; “Sagittarius A*”, the supermassive black hole at the middle, 27000 light-years away from us, 4 million times more massive than our Sun.

One of the observed stars, S2, managed a complete orbit within the 16-year observation. During observations, an intense flare was spotted from the edge of SgrA* itself, which is probably one of the few ways to directly observe a black hole. See the Max Planck Institute's Galactic Centre Research pages for more information.